The Celaran Refuge (Parker Interstellar Travels Book 8)

by Michael McCloskey

  The planet was covered in beautiful, healthy vines.

  Maybe we could live here!

  “[Hope for strong starlight] Maybe they won’t follow us here,” said Shypilot.

  Chapter 11

  Magnus gazed out across the flat surface that surrounded the Celaran facilities. The newcomers had been immediately accepted by the security forces that the PIT team had previously struggled with. Siobhan and Telisa had told him that the entire facility had been put to use producing small spacecraft, building new security robots, and bolstering defenses.

  We need a real Vovokan ship with large-scale manufacturing capability like the Clacker had. The Celarans are advanced, but those capital ships of Shiny’s are enormous factory-fortresses.

  Agrawal stood next to him, watching the Celarans fly about with each other and their robots. Grant and Timon wandered about nearby. Agrawal seemed to adapt to fluid situations much better than the robot handlers, Grant and Timon, who remained fish out of water.

  “Siobhan is working with the Celarans,” Magnus said. “Whatever production they can spare down here will go to us. She’s going to have them producing flying combat machines, but we can special order some things and see what happens.”

  “So we need to figure out what to make,” Agrawal said. “And we need to keep in mind we only have two handlers—or four, if we pitch in.”

  “Exactly,” Magnus said. “The team is working on Destroyer weaknesses. In the meantime, we can start with what took out the Storks.”

  “High energy weapons,” Agrawal said. “The alien assault machines didn’t launch any kinetic weapons on the ground. The initial missile wave came from starships. I heard they tried to divert small asteroids and the like toward the colony, but the Celaran space bases were able to prevent any serious impacts.”

  “I heard about that, too, but we’re not sure if they really meant for anything big to hit the ground, or if it was just a distraction. Seems like the Destroyers aren’t willing to truly obliterate these planets from orbit. They probably want the planets relatively intact for themselves.”

  “Yes, though they are willing to kill off the vine ecosystem,” Agrawal offered.

  “Anyway, since they use energy weapons almost exclusively, the kinetic armor on the Storks was wasted,” Magnus said, steering back on topic. “We could replace it with reflective armor or energy diffusion systems. Still, I don’t think we want to spend resources trying to bulk up our last five Storks or eleven PIT soldier bots.”

  “Agreed. Let’s start from their weaknesses, not ours,” Agrawal suggested. “Our Storks did relatively well against their drones but couldn’t hurt the tanks or colossals. The Celaran trapdoor lasers did well against the drones, too. Even small arms fire can take the drones out—not that we have enough people or machines left to launch projectiles.”

  “What I’m hearing is that we need something to destroy the larger ones,” Magnus said. “And that unless we’re shooting from a starship, we can’t kill them with energy weapons.”

  Agrawal nodded. “We need cannons. And direct fire, not indirect, as the Destroyers had good sensor coverage and were able to intercept incoming dangers above the canopy. Lower, though, the rounds came in through the vine cover and weren’t stopped in time.”

  “Excellent. Kinetic attacks, down low. Sounds more like we want mines rather than cannons? And I hope that a simple mine design that launches a guided projectile upward could be mass-produced by the Celarans.”

  “Ah, mines. The kinetic equivalent of the trapdoor lasers. I like it,” Agrawal said. “Very little need for handlers with such devices. We bury them, I assume?”

  “We could, or we could design them all to look like a native plant, one of those creepy things that grows down along the jungle floor below the vines. Burying them might be safer. If the Destroyers catch on, dumb as they’re supposed to be, we’d be finished.”

  Magnus knew that Terrans no longer made metallic mines due to the ease with which they could be detected. Modern UNSF mines were made of materials that looked organic in scans. The mines could be connected to sensors placed above the surface or operate with their own passive sensors, and like the smart weapons the PIT team employed, they would accept fire and no-fire target sig lists to keep friendlies from being hurt.

  “I have a catalog of designs we could send to your friend Siobhan right away,” Agrawal said. “The LAAV-killer series, for instance. They fire a single spike of ceramic to penetrate the hull of low altitude armored craft. They also have an EMP equivalent.”

  “EM pulses. Hrm,” Magnus said. He opened a channel with Agrawal and added Marcant to it.

  “Yes, Magnus?” Marcant responded.

  “I’m going to have Agrawal send over a design of one of the Space Force’s EMP mines,” Magnus said. “Can... Achaius? Is that the name? Can Achaius tell us if the tanks could be harmed by that weapon system?”

  “Tanks? Oh, the MTACs,” Marcant said.

  “What’s your acronym?” Agrawal asked.

  “Middle tier assault carriers,” Marcant said.

  “I’ll stick with tanks,” Magnus said. “Please let me know when you have an answer—”

  “Achaius says that system would not do permanent damage by itself, but suggests a tactic involving its use,” Marcant said.

  Wow, fast response.

  “Really?”

  “If you coordinate a kinetic attack together with the pulse, at the right timing, the EMP mine could greatly increase the effectiveness of the kinetic attack. This kind of clever combined arms approach is how the Vovokan battle spheres managed to do so much damage against the Destroyer tanks.”

  “Well, things might be looking up,” Magnus said to Agrawal off the channel.

  “We could pair that design with a ceramic spike mine,” Magnus said. “If Achaius can provide us with the desired timing? Not sure what the variables might be. Altitude of the target?”

  “We’ll send you a suggestion within the hour,” Marcant said. “Could we have the design of a spike mine as well? I take it we have a few of these sitting around in a cargo hold somewhere.”

  Magnus nodded to Agrawal. The Space Force man sent more designs.

  “Siobhan will coordinate their manufacture with our Celaran friends, if you can advise us on an effective solution,” Magnus said.

  “We’ll do our best,” Marcant said. Magnus could not tell anything about Marcant’s disposition, so he did not worry about it after closing the channel.

  “We need to get a best guess as to how many we can get, and how fast we can get them, then make a deployment plan,” Agrawal said.

  Magnus nodded. “We don’t know how long until the Destroyers come to this place, though it seems likely they will.”

  Magnus turned to scan the forest beyond the fence as if looking for the Destroyers already.

  “Why the fence? Dangerous things out there?” asked Agrawal.

  “A few wild creatures. A thing that looks like a net and tries to drop down over you, and a silvery worm-creature that can electrocute you,” Magnus said. “I have the target sigs for you and the handlers just in case...”

  Magnus went off-retina and searched through the sigs he had collected.

  “There’s also an alien race we call the Blackvines,” Magnus said. “So far we’ve found that they aren’t social, but not hostile either. Close to harmless. I meant to ask the Celarans about them, but I guess we’ve been busy trying to survive.”

  Magnus added the Blackvine target sig to the others and shared them with Agrawal.

  “The Celarans are building another perimeter a half kilometer out. There won’t be a fence, but more of the force towers. There will also be a network of sensors that can detect the Destroyers if they approach.”

  “That’ll be easy,” Agrawal said. He scratched the dense stubble on his dark chin. “All that light and wind.”

  Magnus’s link received a high priority message alert. It was Cilreth.

  “Th
e Destroyers followed us here,” she sent to the team channel.

  Magnus and Agrawal traded concerned looks.

  “Already? In what numbers?” Magnus asked.

  “Well, it’s just the last squadron, the one they held in reserve. They arrived at this system a few hours ago. They headed for this planet, then changed course and moved away.”

  “We’re just now learning this?” Caden demanded.

  “The Celarans have just informed me,” Cilreth said.

  “They didn’t fight?”

  “The Celarans haven’t been engaged. The unique ship we spotted came in and landed on this planet.”

  “Five Entities! Give us its course,” Telisa demanded.

  “It landed in the largest ocean, here,” Cilreth said, sending a pointer. The oceans on Idrick Piper were smaller than Earth’s oceans, covering about fifty percent of the planet. The body of water Cilreth indicated had a shore 3000 kilometers from the Celaran manufacturing base where the PIT team worked.

  “It must be a big assault craft,” Magnus suggested.

  “It’s a different design. It’s not like the ones that’ve been hitting us.”

  “The scary part is, it’s in the ocean,” Siobhan said. “You get it? They’re aquatic. That’s their home territory, even if it’s an alien ocean. If they evolved on a planet about this far from a star, covered in a lot of water, how different could it be?”

  “So they have a presence on the planet now, and we can’t exactly go pay them a visit,” Magnus said. “This will be a problem.”

  “Telisa, it could be a colonizer ship,” Caden said.

  “That might not be so bad in the short term,” Cilreth said. “They could only live in the ocean, right?”

  “It could be a Von Neumann type of factory seed,” Siobhan said. “If we let it bootstrap an economy here, it might be impossible to stop.”

  “If only we had known, we could have tried to intercept it,” Telisa said. “Now we have to find it and destroy it.”

  “How would we destroy it?” Caden asked.

  “Well, our spacecraft can go into the water, though not very deep,” Telisa said.

  Agrawal shook his head but did not say anything on the channel. Magnus agreed with the sentiment. Using starships as submarine assault vehicles did not sound good to him.

  “Sounds too risky,” Magnus said. “Only very specialized starships—”

  “Only specialized Terran vessels, yes, but the Celaran starships may be as super-versatile as everything else they build,” Telisa said. “We’ll figure something out. We have control of local space... surely that can be used to our advantage.”

  “You said just the Destroyer ship landed. What about the rest of the squadron?”

  “Still in-system, but maintaining extreme range. Keeping tabs on us, I suppose. The Celarans are watching them, but they won’t go looking for a fight.”

  “Then that’s another timer we’re on. The Destroyers may ask for reinforcements from other systems.”

  Chapter 12

  “Perhaps the star will rise to bring a bright day, and we’ll discover the Destroyers have gone to live in peace under the vast waters,” said Lee.

  Siobhan stood next to the alien who hovered in the old ship’s mess. Siobhan wanted to work out a robot design with Lee around to comment on it before sending the request off to the other Celarans for production. Caden hovered nearby, visiting Siobhan on a break from his own duties.

  “That ship’s a threat. Trust me,” Siobhan said. “Even if it was just a colony module, like whatever you drop from the probe ship to start these buildings. They’re hiding in their native environment, more or less. I’m sure that this ocean has a somewhat different composition than they have on their home planet, but it’s similar enough, or they wouldn’t have gone there.”

  “Vines to be snipped and drained, why do the Destroyers send their machines to stop our lives?” asked Lee.

  “I don’t have the complete answer,” Siobhan said. “It may be that they feel a fear that can only be quelled by removing us from the universe. Or it may be how they survived to this point, by actively seeking out and destroying competition.”

  “There’s one more possibility we know of,” Caden said. He looked at Siobhan.

  He wants to mention the Vovokans. I guess I don’t feel like stopping him.

  “It may be that the Destroyers were not like this at first. We think they made friends with the Vovokans. A group of the Vovokans may have attacked them to get something they wanted, and that made the Destroyers think they needed to fight to survive. We heard they might treat all aliens the same now, treat them all as very dangerous.”

  “The leaf has been turned over, I know now that not all aliens are dangerous,” Lee said.

  “Let’s take a look at some designs for a flying weapon,” Siobhan said. “You have the disk design already, which helped a lot.”

  “Vines so twisted they cannot be followed,” Lee preambled. “We have tools that take things apart, but these... tools that take things apart that do not want to be taken apart, things that try to take you apart at the same time. It’s scary that you have compact terms for these things.”

  “I’m sorry Lee. We just want to help. Do you know that?” Siobhan said.

  “Starlight on the leaves, thank you for saving us.”

  Siobhan almost returned to the design concepts when Lee continued.

  “The remains of old vines kept alive in memory, there were some among us who contemplated these things when the Destroyers first attacked. I don’t know what became of them.”

  “Some Celarans fought back?” Caden said. “I thought you had only scientists to devise means of resisting the Destroyers.”

  “Olds vines almost forgotten, a few of us could do these things... though maybe not as well as you do. Many were scientists who researched new tools to stop the attacks. We have not heard from them for a long time. Perhaps you should ask another.”

  “We will, thanks,” Siobhan said. She tagged the conversation and forwarded it to Telisa for review.

  “Here’s the design of your disk machines,” Siobhan said. She shared her PV with Lee. A schematic of the disk machine appeared. “You used them as missiles in the last battle, damaging the largest Destroyers by hitting those machines at top speed. They were highly effective.”

  “A predator threatens a friend on the vine, we acted in desperation and lost our machines.”

  “I see two avenues for improvement: one, you could stick with self-destructing devices, but we can alter these disks to break up and deliver multiple kinetic warheads, if you will, instead of just the disk body. The frame can be shaped to split just before impact, spreading the damage inflicted across a wider area. We could still get good penetration if we need it by putting tungsten spikes into them. Also, a higher capacity storage ring might mean there would still be energy left over at impact, so once the ring is shattered, the remaining energy would be released, causing even more damage.”

  “I like it,” Caden said. “Previously, you just rammed these sophisticated, multipurpose robots into the Destroyers. But if they were designed with this in mind from the beginning, they would be much more effective at delivering damage.”

  “Many different things must be done on a bright day, if the robots are designed simply to die, how can they be useful in other ways?”

  “Ah, yes, I recall it’s not your way to design things with one goal in mind. However, in this case, let me try and convince you it’s worthwhile. Survival is of the utmost importance. Weapons are best designed as weapons and little else. You have to maximize their effectiveness because... nothing else is important if you’re dead.”

  “A path found through the vines, I think I see your point, but with such limited resources, we may need to make efficient use of them, which means giving the machines many functions.”

  “Hrm. I was afraid of that,” Siobhan sent to Caden privately. “She wants to add a lot of functions, but th
ey’ll end up with reduced combat effectiveness.”

  “Their way is not necessarily wrong,” Caden said. “By giving the machines a lot of capabilities and abilities, they can use them for a lot of different work, improving the efficiency of the whole colony... and economic strength will translate into military strength, in the long run.”

  “Yes, if we survive to see the long run, I guess maybe that’s so,” Siobhan said to Caden. She switched back to the shared channel.

  “Lee, what if we made the disks’ cargo capacity flexible so they could carry food and move things around for you until it’s time for battle, then we swap in warheads and make the disks one-shot weapons? Then you can use them for other tasks until the attack comes.”

  “What’s the other route?” said a happy voice.

  Siobhan did a double-take. It was Lee who had spoken.

  “Fracksilvers!” Siobhan burst out. “Marcant updated the translators again. Your preamble became... a tone of voice.”

  “Is something wrong?” asked Lee innocently, gliding in a wide circle around them and flashing brightly. Lee’s voice sounded airy.

  It sounds like the voice of someone... not so intelligent and without a care. Could that be accurate, or does it reflect Marcant’s assessment of them?

  Siobhan accepted it as an improvement over the preambles. Strictly speaking, hearing the emotional content in the delivery of the main statement made more sense for Terrans, even though Siobhan thought she had been getting the hang of interpreting the mood through the preambles.

  They’re aliens. There’s no way to be sure.

  “The other route would be to try and preserve the machines. We would equip them with missile mounts. The machines would launch the missiles from under the canopy near the enemy, and then retreat, live to fight another day. We could also stockpile missiles out in the jungle, the disks could fly back, rearm, and attack again. Of course, we would take some losses, but each machine would have some chance of surviving each run.”